JFK: the more you know….

November 23, 2013

AS THE 50th Anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy approaches, it seems that in conspiracy circles, the more you know, the more minor details you pile up and the more inexplicable everything seems. 

We are blinded not by the trees but by the gnarls and whorls and lines of the bark, the curl of the roots and the veins of the leaves. Looking at the event in retrospect, we closely examine every minor detail and are shocked by the level of improbability and coincidence that brought dozens of minor characters to the scene, and we seek explanations for every one of them. 

No event – no random moment in history – could stand up to such scrutiny without being invested with a certain sense of the uncanny.  I suspect that when it comes to Kennedy getting his brains blown out, things actually need to be simplified. Sometimes, an obsession with every little detail just doesn’t help. We drown in it. We become incapacitated by it. 

As far as the assassination is concerned, one would think every event when viewed in retrospect is bound to throw up similar anomalies and uncanny coincidences and apparent mysteries. Tapes are discovered and analysed for the information they might somehow yield, that might somehow tip us all over the edge into a state of absolute certainty. They never do: in fact, they tend to add to the ambiguity of the day, an ambiguity I suspect we ourselves have imposed on the event – as if we need to match the enormity of the assassination with the assiduousness and fastidious attention to minute detail we think it deserves.

Don De Lillo, in the preface to his gripping Kennedy assassination novel Libra, put it like this:

Is there something else poised at the edge of revelation, some hard clear provable reality, one that points either to Oswald as the lone gunman or to the presence of second shooter in Dealey Plaza that day, as the motorcade moved down Elm Street? 

We are all looking for this “hard clear provable reality”, but the more evidence we seek, the less clear it all becomes. We are merely generating fog.

Amateur scholars appear and claim to have found the answer amid the maelstrom of white noise, but even if they really had, how many of us would actually believe him? If one of the dozens of new theories being published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary actually provided conclusive proof one way or another about what happened that day in Dallas, there would still be naysayers with scraps of random evidence about LBJ or J. Edgar Hoover or Clay Shaw or Sam Giancana or any of the hundreds of other sepulchral, sinister figures hovering on the fringes of the Kennedy Plot which does not seem to fit the theory, and therefore keeps everything about the assassination in play.

Life consists of millions upon millions of low-probability events. One is struck by the variety of different factors that had to be in place in order to make those events happen, and one makes the mistake of assuming that all those factors couldn't possibly have happened by chance. Thus, one looks for unifying theories, for the all-encompassing executive power capable of organising every link in a clandestine chain that connects everyone from the gunman to the vice-president to the members of the Warren Commission and swears every single one of them to secrecy, on pain of death.  

We were unhappy with the prima facie case against Oswald because we simply did not want it to be him. We didn’t want it to be so simple. Belief trumps evidence. But if we have now learned that evidence cannot always be trusted, then how can we possibly know what it is that can be trusted? That is to say: if nothing can be believed, then on what grounds do we choose to believe the worst?  

The JFK assassination brings up the ultimate epistemological problem: how do we know what we know, and how can we be sure that what we know is true? So many conspiracy theorists have the confidence to assume that they know more than the dozens of state-appointed scientists, forensic investigators, ballistic experts and witnesses who contributed to the Warren Commission’s report. In the case of the so-called magic-bullet theory, they assume that they understand the evidence in such a way that they alone are capable of uncovering inconsistencies in the autopsy that point to an all-encompassing cover-up by the State. They raise questions that they say will undermine the whole premise of the “lone gunman” theory. 

But one has to ask: at what point would they finally be reassured that Oswald was the only shooter? What sort of evidence would be required before they would finally be satisfied, one way or another? Similar problems occur with the “truthers”, still desperate to believe that the hijacked planes were flown into New York and crashed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 in order to conceal the fact that the Bush administration or the military-industrial complex had planted explosives in the foundations of the buildings in order to… erm, provide the pretext on which the United States could justify draconian security legislation as well as an invasion of Iraq. Any evidence to the contrary, any use of Occam’s Razor, any appeal to rationality, far from dissuading them from their crackpot theory, merely confirms the extent of the official cover-up. The question is: why do they think they know what they know? What convinces them of their “truth”? 

All this goes to show: appeals to the evidence can never be enough to satisfy true believers. Donald Rumsfeld said what we don't know can be divided into known unknowns and unknown unknowns. What he forgot to mention were the various knowns and unknowns we don't actually want to know. What we know about JFK's death is that it demeans us, forcing us to invent alternative realities that retain the possibility of heroism or something pertaining to the sacred.